NASHVILLE — A suit was filed against a Manchester doctor the United States and Tennessee in U.S. District Court in Nashville Thursday, announced David Rivera, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee.

The suit, primarily directed at Matthew Anderson, a chiropractor from Lenoir City, includes Dr. David Florence, who has also served as the official doctor for the Coffee County jail. The suit alleges that Anderson and Florence, a doctor of osteopathy, made fraudulent claims to Medicare and TennCare in violation of the False Claims Act and the Tennessee Medicaid False Claims Act.

The suit also names the Cookeville Center for Pain Management; Preferred Pain Center of Grundy County; McMinnville Pain Relief Center; and PMC Management; and claims that the defendants have been unjustly enriched and caused Medicare and TennCare to pay out money through mistake of fact, said the news release issued by US Attorney David Boling.

Anderson is a chiropractor who operated four pain clinics in Tennessee. Although several of these clinics changed names at times, they were recently known as Cookeville Center for Pain Management; Spinal Pain Solutions in Harriman; Preferred Pain Center of Grundy County in Gruetli Laager; and McMinnville Pain Relief Center.

Anderson operated these clinics both on his own and later through his management company, PMC Management. All of the clinics are now closed, except that the clinic in Harriman. now operates under a new name with new owners

According to the complaint, Anderson believed that medical clinics had to have a physician owner, so he recruited several physicians to serve as the sham owners of the four pain clinics, while Anderson, and later his company PMC, managed the clinics.

The complaint alleges that the four pain clinics engaged in the following fraud schemes:

Anderson operated Cookeville Center for Pain Management as a pill mill in which a nurse practitioner wrote prescriptions for controlled substances for Medicare and TennCare patients that had no legitimate medical purpose. Medicare and TennCare ultimately paid for those prescriptions, which were not allowable under Program rules.

Anderson instructed employees at the four pain clinics to upcode office visits, by assigning an inaccurate billing code to increase Medicare reimbursement.

Anderson continued to allow the pain clinics in Cookeville and Harriman to operate as pain management clinics and bill Medicare for services during a period in 2012 in which medical directors were not on site for the minimum time during operating hours as required by Tennessee law governing pain management clinics.

In addition, Florence, who was one of the sham physician owners, also ran a pill mill out of his Center for Advanced Medicine in Manchester.

According to the complaint, Anderson reaped more than $5 million from the four pain clinics, and took more than 90 percent of the pain clinics’ profits, while the sham physicians only earned a salary for their service as medical directors.

“The government alleges that the scheme defrauded Medicare and TennCare of at least $1 million. The United States and Tennessee are seeking to recover treble damages plus penalties pursuant to the False Claims Act,” the release stated.

"These defendants allegedly supplied narcotics to patients without regard to medical need," said Derrick L. Jackson, the Special Agent in Charge at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General in Atlanta. "The result was an expansion of abuse and addiction to controlled substances which enriched the defendants at the expense of the taxpayers."